Scanning the news last Monday morning, I saw that Mei Xhang, the female panda at the National Zoo, had given birth to a cub after five artificial inseminations and false pregnancies. I raced over to the zoo for a noon press conference and spent a lot of time talking with reproductive physiologist Pierre Comizzoli who calls himself Mei Xiang's "personal gynecologist." After learning how much time, effort, and money goes into the zoos panda program, it was a shock to learn that within a week of its birth, the little cub had died.

I wrote about the high cost of this program, and the impact of "marquee" animals on broader conservation efforts in an article for GlobalPost.